Tackling the Killer Mentality - Ed Brenegar, Author

Tackling the Killer Mentality

By Ed Brenegar, Columnist Asheville Citizen-Times

Do you ever wonder about how certain people end up the way they do? How does a person like Bill Clinton rise up out of abject poverty to become President of the United States, and a kid who may have grown-up next door to him end up in jail or dead from a gunshot wound?

This is a question that psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have researched and debated for generations. It is the old nature or nurture question. My own perspective is that both play an important role in the development of a person.

It is this question that I kept thinking about when the four boys were arrested for shooting into the Erwin High School gymnasium. Is there some natural deficiency that made these boys more susceptible to violence than say a thousand other boys their age? Or is there something in their background which has encouraged violence as an acceptable form of self-expression?

David Grossman, Lt. Col., U.S. Army (retired), who is an expert on the psychology of killing, attributes the "virus of violence" to the nurture side of my question. Grossman, director of the Warrior Science Group focuses on media violence as the tutor of young boys, conditioning them to kill in much the same way the military trains combatants. He asserts that the same desensitization that soldiers receive to prepare them to kill the enemy in combat is what children are being trained to do through video game violence and the countless number of murders and acts of aggression committed on television each day.

When I first heard this, I responded like you may be now, thinking that he is just some anti-television reactionary. But the evidence he presents convinces me he is on to something significantly insightful. Without going into detail, let me describe his point this way.

Every one of us learns by following role models and the repetition of skills. We learn to talk and to read by listening to others and trying ourselves. Eventually thinking in a language becomes second nature, automatic, a reflexive skill. Reading is difficult to learn, but it can be by diligent practice. We learn by example and repetition. Scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi characterizes it this way: "To learn by example...You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art..."

In other words, our kids are being tutored in the tradition of violence and killing through the television shows they watch and the video games they play. I'm not anti-television. But it seems that as a society we are rather cavalier in thinking our voyeurism into the world of violence carries with it no consequences.

The American Medical Association reports that within fifteen years after the introduction of television, homicides, rapes, and assaults doubled in the United States. Of course, there are other contributing factors, but the question for me remains. Either the young boys who are committing these acts are "natural born killers" or they are being tutored to be so. If it is the latter, then who is doing this? Where are they learning to shoot people as well as an Army marksman? At home? ... at school? ... at church?

Grossman in describing the Jonesboro, Arkansas, middle school shooting explained that one child was experienced in the use of guns and the other was not.

"Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range of over 100 yards, and they hit 15 people. That's pretty remarkable shooting."

The tragedy of this conditioning of young boys to kill is that they have been tutored to believe that the person they shoot will not be hurt. In the words of one teenage boy who killed a convenience store clerk, when asked why he did it, "I don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed to happen."

Yes, that's true. But it will happen again. It will because we are not yet ready to face the truth that violence is an art which is learned by the repetition of skills and the nurturing of role models.